


Two in Extremis

by Caia (Caius)



Category: Avengers and The New Avengers (comic)
Genre: Action/Adventure, Body Sharing, Gen, Yuletide, challenge:Yuletide 2008, recipient:ImaginaryAlice
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2008-12-25
Updated: 2008-12-25
Packaged: 2017-10-02 16:33:10
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,051
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8410
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Caius/pseuds/Caia
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A combat accident leaves Carol Danvers and Tony Stark occupying the same body. Set after the Ultron plot in Mighty Avengers; ignores Secret Invasion.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Two in Extremis

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks so much to Mizzmarvel for the beta and to everyone who listened to me panic.

"FSSSSSSSSSSST!" Alkhema hit Stark square-on with sort of energy blast. Iron Man slowly drifted downwards, jets losing fuel, trying rather pathetically to get in one more shot with left repulser.

"Fuck!" Carol half-instinctively caught him around the arm--the right one--as he drifted past.

"Let _go_, I can make it," Tony said, and Carol rolled his eyes and was about to drop him the hundred-or-so feet down to the ground when Alkhema caught up with them both.

In retrospect, she should have made sure to drop Tony _before_ launching her counterattack, but she didn't exactly have a whole lot of time. So Carol's attack, Alkhema's, and Tony's all collided and engulfed all three of them in a huge, electrifying burst of energy.

As she slipped out of consciousness and drifted through the ground, Carol missed her binary powers. Not so long ago, she ate more energy than that for breakfast...

* * *

It was another nightmare, it had to be. One more nightmare of a plane crash for the ex-Air Force pilot. one more nightmare of being trapped in a small space with Tony Stark for Ms. Marvel, one more nightmare of being awakened to a cacophony of alarm bells...

And then Carol was awake. This was not something even _her_ subconscious could come up with; this could only be reality. Glowing yellow status reports scrolled in front of her eyelids, charts and figures faster than she could process, flashing red warning signs indicating, "LEFT REPULSER OFFLINE," "RIGHT ROCKET JET 34% POWER," "CHEST ARMOR RECONFIGURING," and "VITAL SIGNS OFF SCALE--ADAPTING."

Repulsers? Carol thought. Was she in Tony's armor somehow? She tried to get up. Her limbs all _hurt_, and they did seem heavier than usual. The displays got even more urgent, brightly colored, and annoying.

Closing her eyes did nothing about the displays. "Status report _off_, armor." She figured it was worth a shot, and surprisingly enough the armor responded, reducing the displays to a single "CONDITION CRITICAL" and then disappearing.

In a moment's blessed silence, Carol considered her situation. Apparently she had somehow wound up in Tony's armor? Where was Tony? Where was Alkhema in all this? And how was she get out of the armor--or failing that, operate it?

And why did she ever agree to work with Tony Stark, anyway?

Suddenly, another voice joined her in the armor. Tony Stark's voice--actually, halfway in between Tony's voice and Iron Man's. "Armor, status report please."

All the information that Carol had just managed to dismiss, reappeared. "Argh! I just got _rid_ of all that shit!"

"...Carol?" said Tony.

"Tony Stark! How the _hell_ did I wind up in your armor!"

"I don't know. I'm going to have to consult with the armor, don't interrupt." The data transfer got quicker and quicker, as Tony sent through queries that Carol couldn't understand the half of. It was headache-inducing.

"You do that. I'm going to see if I can figure out where Alkhema got to." Carol could really use someone to hit right now. She opened her eyes again and peered through the storms of data to try see her surroundings. "Armor, could you just show all that stuff to _Tony_ and let me see outside?"

"UNKNOWN COMMAND," flashed in front of Carol's eyes briefly, and then it was back to Tony's data.

"It can't distinguish us. I'm working on that. Hang on," said Tony.

"Wait, what? Your armor can't tell us apart now? First you didn't bother to virus shield the damn thing, and now _this_? How the hell did it pull _that_ one off?" Carol pulled herself up for a better view. The armor's status erupted in bright-red complaints--"Oh, shut up," Carol said to it--but she got herself up just fine. Superstrength was *good* for getting not-terribly functional armor to move.

Police had cordoned off the area; so far so good. It looked like some of the other Avengers--Natasha and Jan, probably--were helping coordinate the clean up. There were some bits and pieces of debris around, but no sign of Alkhema--had she gotten away? Or was she somewhere in there too?

"Extremis and your energy signature and something or other from Alkhema. It all got tangled up. I'm working on it and--_stop that_, you're damaging the armor!" The armor...stopped. So did Carol.

"...Tony! You're back!" Jan appeared suddenly in front of them. "...did you see Carol? Wait...what's up with your armor?" She put herself on her guard and signaled for back-up. "Alkhema, are you in there?"

"HEY!" Carol said. "I'm Carol! I'm here!" She looked down at herself. Sure enough, she was in Tony's armor--it was damaged, and repairing itself in the creepy half-alive way that Tony's Extremis armor did, and...it was her size and shape.

Jan looked at them in puzzlement. "Carol?"

Carol said, "I'm right _here_."

"So am I," said the armor. "I mean, me. Tony Stark. I'm in my armor. And she's wearing it."

They both looked at Jan. "Where's Alkhema?"

"Shut down in the blast. We just hauled most of her back for study." She looked them up and down. "We're going to have to check you both to see if some of her got into the armor."

"Yes," said Tony. "I don't see her, but I'll need to do further tests."

"Great." Carol crossed her arms, which took way more force than it should have. "Open up, armor, I'm getting out." DETACHMENTS OF ARMOR COMPONENTS NOT RECOMMENDED AT THIS POINT. FULL SYSTEM REQUIRED TO REBUILD AND RECHARGE. "That's not my problem. Open!"

"No," Tony said. "That's not going to work. The Extremis virus has attached itself into your body and your brain. Even if you take the armor off, you won't be rid of either it or me, and it could have unfortunate results for both of us. We're going to need to get back to a lab."

"That fucking _suit_ of yours! Okay, back we go." Carol tried to launch them into the air.

"Not like that!" Tony locked the suit, keeping them both on the ground. "If you try to fly the way you usually do, it could do destroy my armor, and us in it!"

"It's in my body. Why _shouldn't_ I fly the way I usually do?"

"The neural systems aren't going to match up. I was used to using the armor when I got Extremis, and it still took awhile to make sure everything matched up properly. Also, you risk melting us from within with your energy powers."

"Okay, then. Armor: fly us to Tony's lab." REPAIRING. FLIGHT NOT RECOMMENDED AT THIS POINT.

Jan looked up from her communicator and shook her head. "Stop it, both of you. I'm on it."

A small Quinjet landed; Natasha opened up the door and pointed her guns at them. "Alkhema?" she asked Jan.

"I'm _Ms. Marvel_," and at the same time, "I'm Tony Stark." Tony opened up the Armor's face plate.

Jan and Natasha stared. "Who do I _look_ like?" asked Carol.

"Like Carol," said Jan. "Tony, you have _got_ to get your armor fixed."

"I'm working on that," said Tony, solely from the armor's speaker system. Now that Carol was _aware_ her, the continuing technobabble of Tony and the armor, the creepy feeling of the armor...no, focus on her own body, still mostly in there somewhere, strong and female and _her_. Here's who I am, Extremis, she thought, sending pictures and memories in its direction...

And then the Quinjet lurched. "Hang on, we're under attack. More of Alkhema's robots, looks like. I'm going to try to outrun them, but we may need to eject..." Natasha called from the front.

Suddenly, Tony gave a new order to Extremis and the technical readouts impinging on her brain were ones that Carol could understand instantly--stats on the plane's velocity, position, and direction, a view of the three robots following them. "No missiles on this thing, Stark." Natasha commented from the front, matching Carol's observation. "You should fix that."

"The small ones aren't designed for firefights," said Tony. "They're designed to carry Avengers who can do the fighting." Carol, Tony, _and_ the armor were increasingly itchy to do just that. The Quinjet's sensors blended into fight plans, some of which Carol recognized as half-automated versions of her own capabilities and some of which looked like Tony's.

"Armor? Are you fixed yet?" Carol asked. NEARING NORMAL CAPABILITIES. WARNING, ANOMALLIES REMAIN.

"Oh no you don't," said Natasha. "I'm going to get you two back to the lab before you do any damage to yourselves or others."

"It might be too late for that," said Tony.

"Look out!" added Carol, simultaneously. Natasha half-dodged, and avoided two bolts, but one hit them and shook the Quinjet again. A damage report flashed across the armor's display--one of the Quinjet's engines had been hit. They slowed down. The their three robots were gaining, and a fourth had joined the fray.

"We're going to have to get out and fight," said Tony. "That or they'll blast us out of the air."

"Hang on just a bit more--I'm going to try to get to a less populated area..." In a minute, the streets and houses below them thinned out as they got into a richer part of the suburbs. One more near hit and Natasha released Tony and Carol's straps and opened the top of the Quinjet. "Eject now."

Compared to the difficulty of getting the few feet to the Quinjet before, getting into the air was downright easy. Carol leaped into the air, Tony and/or the armor triggered the boot jets, and they were off to kick robot butt. There was still a certain amount of pain involved in the coordination, as the two brains pulled the armor and the body in two different directions, but either it was easier when they were fighting, or Extremis had pulled them together a little more in the interim.

Not that there was time to think about that when there were robots to fight. They looked something like a crude paper airplanes, made of metal and armed to the teeth--unlike some of the Ultron family, designed for function but not style. "That one?" Carol asked Tony silently.

"Yes, but let me..." Before Tony could finish, and quite possibly start an argument, Carol attacked. A combined repulser/energy burst emitted from their right arm, hit the robot square on, blew the robot into a smithereens, scattered the fragments in a 300 yard arc, dinging one of the other robots, three trees, and breaking a window in one of the mansions below. It also fused the armor's right gauntlet and filled the viewscreen and Carol's mind with Tony's and the Armor's error messages and profanities. "I told you!"

"Okay, okay, next ones let's do with our fists." Carol tried to move her fingers. They were fine, but the armor around them...

"Don't do that!" Tony yelped. It sounded as though she was hurting him which--made sense, actually. "You'll damage the armor further."

"Then what do we do?" Carol asked. "Incoming on our right."

"Hit it." Tony swung her around to come at the second robot. "Just no more energy bolts, and be careful of my glove!" Carol went with it, dodged a few bolts from the robot and caught one more on the armor--which wasn't, annoyingly, quite as invulnerable as Carol was--and destroyed the robot with a couple slightly wildly placed punches. Tony kept trying to help.

"Damnit, Tony, couldn't you just let me control the punching? Promise I won't try another bolt." One thing the damn armor was good for--seeing behind her, where the third robot was coming on the attack. It was almost worth the further disorientation as Tony moved her aside from an energy blast.

"Fine." The movement in the armor stopped, although the mechanical chatter didn't; Tony was definitely still there.

"Awesome." It was almost like fighting as herself...only heavier, less maneuverable, and a little less durable. Her punches were a bit stronger at least--the crunch as she laid down her first hit was quite satisfying. The noise of Tony in the back of her head? Much less so. "Up!" "Down!" "Right!" "Watch out!" As always, Tony was the world's worst backseat driver.

Finally the robot was disabled. The right gauntlet was already starting to repair itself--Tony had been working overtime on that while she'd been fighting. Another sensor-sweep of the area--one feature of the armor that Carol could get used to--located no further threats. The fourth robot was on the ground a few feet from the Quinjet, riddled with bullet holes.

"Come on down!" Natasha was standing in front of the door of the Quinjet, guns tucked back into their holsters, arms crossed, watching the fight. "I talked to Jan back at base, it looks like all the robots are accounted for. I've also sent word to local authorities for clean up and compensation to the owner of the house over there." Carol and Tony nodded and landed.

"Is that thing working?" The Quinjet's diagnostics spread out before Carol's eyes and confirmed, simultaneously with Natasha and Tony, that it was.

"Get in," said Natasha. "We're overdue and I don't want to risk any more trouble than we've already had."

It was only a few more minutes back to New York. They landed the Quinjet at the Tower, where Jarvis had clearly been briefed--he let them in with a calm and professional, "Master Tony, Ms. Danvers," and asked them if they wanted any refreshments, which they refused.

At the lab, they they were met by Hank Pym, who stood and stared at them for a moment. "I see why Jan called me. Although apparently you aren't Ultron this time?"

"No, I'm Carol." Carol opened the helmet, exposing her face.

"And Tony," said the armor. "Though there might be a bit of Alkhema in here. If so, she hasn't surfaced yet."

Hank jumped. "Do you keep a mirror down here?"

"Of course." A command from Extremis rotated a wall panel into a full-length mirror.

"Oh FUCK." Carol stared at her face, which was...slightly more masculine, and starting to grow a black mustache.

"It's worse than I thought." Tony's voice was, for a second, starting to come from Carol's mouth, before he stopped it and moved it back to the armor. "We're going to have to fix this soon, or we're never going to get apart."

Carol looked the rest of herself--themselves--up and down. The armor had healed, and she could see the design of her costume quite clearly through the general color scheme of the armor. And was it her imagination, or was the figure more androgynous than it had been when she'd last looked? "Fix it _now_," said Carol.

"Yes. Hank, get the analysis that's been done on the parts of Alkhema they've brought back in case some of her is in this mess, too. I don't want to handle them myself just now, for fear of activating her if she's in here. I'm going to have to hook up to the computers here and compare our current status to all the data I've got on me and Carol. Fortunately we've still got most of Carol's biology, that would be the hardest to duplicate..." Tony started to pace back and forth, realized that he was not in full control of his body, then stood still in mechanical frustration as the data started to flow. Carol heard Tony's frustration: the downside of Extremis' direct connection to technology was that there were no damn buttons to push. "Actually, we should lie down for this. It _should_ be just diagnostic, but it might go further than that." A bed slid out from the wall and Carol and Tony lay down.

Carol had been focusing anxiously on her (their?) body, trying to figure out how much of it had changed, but it was drowned out by the flood of information that came through Extremis on both of them. Their vital statistics, more than she'd ever really wanted to know about Tony's long and exciting medical history, her longer and stranger one; Tony's childhood, his mother, his father, his wild and precocious youth, lots of lots of knowledge of science and engineering, his imprisonment, Iron Man, his sex life, his alcoholism, all went past quickly and in detail; sketchier and drier information about her own childhood, her mother and father and brothers, her time in the air force and with NASA, Ms. Marvel, Rogue, Binary, Warbird, Ms. Marvel again, Tony's notes on her own alcoholism....

Hank walked into the room "Tony? Carol? Are you all right? I've got the data--_Tony! Carol!_ You're changing further. The computer displays aren't recognizing you as Carol anymore..."

Carol looked up at Hank and then down at herself. "_Tony Stark! Stop! Armor! Abort!_" The armor design was shimmering back in forth between her costume design and Tony's, with occasionally flashes of previous looks for one or the other of them in between. Worse, she could feel the body beneath the costume changing as well--her boobs were flattening and expanding, and a penis was growing and disappearing between her legs.

Finally Tony's voice came out of the stream of words and said, "Oh no. Not right. Extremis! ABORT TRANSFER."

And finally, it stopped. Unfortunately, it stopped with the body half-way between Tony's and Carol's. "Okay, let's try this another way."

"No shit." said Carol.

Hank looked at them carefully, then checked the readings on Tony's equipment. "At least you don't look like Alkhema, or Mockingbird for that matter."

Mockingbird? Carol wondered for a moment, and then remembered (or was filled-in by Extremis and/or Tony on) that bit of Alkhema's history: she had been created by Ultron using Mockingbird's brain patterns.

"The preliminary results suggest we caught all of her, too," Hank continued. "But it's always hard to tell with these things."

"Good to know." Carol's voice wasn't her own anymore, either, but neither was it Tony's. Hank jumped a little and looked even more embarrassed--the way he always did when they were fighting Ultron or one of his creations.

"Okay," said Tony, speaking from the armor and doing a much better job of keeping _his_ voice Iron Man's. "The basic idea remains the same. Extremis has gotten confused about which of us is which and who belongs in the armor, and we're going to have to reprogram it to know the difference. But since putting both files in at once just made the merger worse--we're going to have to risk taking the armor off."

"Finally." Carol started pulling at the armor plating, trying to detach the armor.

"No, just push at it with your mind. And at me at the same time--we're going to try to have as much of me in the armor and as much of you in the body as we can. Hank--if the armor skatters, put it on the bed over there." A push from Extremis and a second bed extended from the wall of the lab next to the one Carol and Tony were on.

Well, _that_ was easy enough to do--exactly what she'd been wanting to do all along. Carol _shoved_ and Tony shoved back and the armor went flying. The armor started trying to coalesce itself in midair; Hank scooped it all up and placed it on the second bed.

"Great. Now step two--rewriting us as two bodies rather than one." Tony said this out of Carol's mouth.

"STOP THAT." Carol yelled, horrified.

"Sorry. Didn't have enough of my speakers together yet," said Tony-from-the-Armor.

Carol looked at herself. It wasn't what she'd call an improvement. Not having the weight of the armor was nice, but being able to still detect it over on the other bed was horribly disorienting. Meanwhile, the lack of the armor made the changes in the body terribly evident--her costume, torn but somehow still *there* after all of this, stretched over a body that was half-Tony's, half her own. Meanwhile, Tony and the armor still buzzed in the back of her brain.

Tony looked at them too. "Yes, definitely time for step two. Carol? I'm going to pull in the files on us again. When it calls up a memory for you, focus on that--don't worry, I'm not recording." Carol's whole life flashed before her eyes again, but this time without the distraction of Tony's. As she focused on the memories, she could feel herself growing and shrinking and changing again, glowing with power and losing it, over and over again--but this, at least, was as her, not Tony. At the end, she opened her eyes, looked at herself, and was finally, gloriously, Carol Danvers. She leaped from the bed happily, exulting in her body being her own again.

"No, wait, not quite yet," said Tony, and she could still *feel* him in the back of her mind, damn the man.

"Right. What next?"

"Now we have to put _me_ back together." Tony said, this time from the pile of armor that had partially reconstituted itself again.

"Upload your files again?" Carol was not looking forward to another recap of Tony's long, torrid history.

"Yes, and then do a virus scan for Alkhema once we're separated enough. I couldn't do it initially, or it risked detecting and trying to destroy you."

"Right. So what do I do?" Carol stared down at the armor. It still looked creepily like her.

"It should be easy enough. Just ignore me, as hard as you can."

"My pleasure." Carol turned away from the armor and ignored Tony as hard as she could. It was hard, as ignoring Tony always was--she could still _hear_ him in her mind, a stream of technobabble and Tony-ness. But she persevered. She was Carol Danvers, Ms. Marvel, and she was going to stay that way, damnit. She thought about fighting instead--the satisfying crunch of robots against her fist, her _own_ fist, not Tony's.

"Okay, you can pay attention again now." Carol ignored him.

"Carol?" Hank came over to face her. "Step three is over."

She turned around. Tony's armor was shaped like it used to be. The visor raised up, slowly. "Do I look like me?" Tony said. They nodded. "Good. I'm not quite all here yet, but I seem to be out of Carol." He raised a gloved hand to stroke his face. "And at least I have a head."

"We've got the new data on Alkhema imported into your virus-scan," said Hank. "It's ready for you to run whenever you're ready."

"Great." Tony grinned his obnoxious Tony grin at Hank and then turned to Carol. "How're you feeling?"

"I'm so glad you had to ask that," said Carol. "I feel like me." And then, from the back of her mind, she heard: CAROL DANVERS PROGRAM PARAMETERS 95% "FUCK! It's not quite out yet."

"It's going to take a few days for the Extremis virus to work itself out of your system," Tony said. "It should weak enough in you currently that it won't be any match for your Kree biology, though."

"Right. A few more days of having your armor in my body." Carol glared at Tony.

"Hey, I've got a day or so of waiting for my body to regenerate and hoping I don't turn into Alkhema." Tony smiled back at her. "It could always be worse." He waved at her and Hank. "Thanks for you help, Carol, go get some rest, and let me virus-scan in peace."

"Call me if you turn into an evil robot," said Carol, and left. Suddenly, the few hours it would probably be before she once again had to deal with Tony Stark seemed a delightfully long time. She opened the window and flew out over New York, solitary and free.

"Hey Extremis, I don't suppose you could play me some music?" Carol asked. A list of station and song options that scrolled through her brain. While she was stuck with this, she might as well take advantage. But if she still had a robot in her head three days from now? She and Tony would be having some words.


End file.
